Perhaps more traumatizing than the memory of that day is that Aiello never knew what became of Stormy. When his tour in Vietnam was over in 1967, Stormy stayed behind in Vietnam, as each dog did when his handler finished a tour. Back then, the dogs stayed where they were and partnered up with new handlers. Aiello remembers the April afternoon when his captain announced that the replacement handlers were already en route and would be arriving the next day. It was, he told them, the last night they would have with their dogs. Almost all of the handlers, including Aiello, brought blankets out to the kennels to sleep on the ground next to their dogs, wanting to be with them until the very last moment.
For years Aiello wrote to the Marine Corps trying to find Stormy, putting in his bid to take her, mailing letters, making phone calls, but to no avail. He never received a response and was left only to wonder what had become of her. Like the majority of the some 10,000 handlers who served in Vietnam, Aiello never saw his dog again.
Marine handler Ron Aiello and his scout dog Stormy deployed to Vietnam together in 1966. Aiello, whose tour ended in 1967, never knew what became of his canine partner.
Courtesy of Ron Aiello
Of the nearly 5,000 dogs who served their tours in Vietnam from 1964 to 1975, only 204 dogs left the country, and none were out-processed to a life beyond the military.8 The dogs still in-country at the time the US forces evacuated were either euthanized or turned over the South Vietnamese Army, which likely meant death. Their handlers, who left Vietnam believing they would see their partners again, were in the dark about the fates of their dogs. Many wouldn’t discover the truth until years later. And many, to this day, have not recovered from the pain of knowing their dogs were left behind.
In the early 1990s Aiello and some of his Vietnam handler buddies saw a notice circulating for a war dog reunion out in Ocean City, Maryland. They decided to go. They didn’t realize their mistake until they got to the hotel—it was actually a reunion for World War II handlers, not for the guys who served in Vietnam. In the end, Aiello said it didn’t matter—not the difference in wars or the generations between them. They were all handlers.
Aiello and the other Vietnam veterans spent those three days laughing, talking, and sharing memories of their dogs with the old timers. “They would close their eyes and listen,” he says. “Their stories were our stories.”
Two
The House of Misfit Dogs
Now the most important point . . . is this question of the keepers. It is more important than that of the dog.
—Lieutenant Colonel E. H. Richardson
In the late 1990s, at the Lackland Air Force Base kennels in Texas, there was one dog so aggressive, so vicious and unapproachable that Dr. Stewart Hilliard, chief of the Department of Defense’s Military Working Dog Training Course and resident animal behaviorist, started to document the efforts to train him. Taint was an ornery, raging beast of a dog; a notorious biter who had grown to deserve his disparaging name.
Curious to see if even a problem dog like Taint could be used in the program, Hilliard asked handler Staff Sergeant Chris Jakubin to work alongside him in testing Taint’s boundaries. Jakubin was eager to help. He had a great respect for Hilliard, whom he called “Doc,” and often trailed around after him, peppering Hilliard with questions about training techniques or a dog he was having trouble with. After they mounted a video camera on the top of the kennel so they could film these attempts, Jakubin donned the necessary protective layers and pulled on a pair of gloves to shield his hands. They were expecting the worst.
But when Jakubin opened the door and went in, nothing happened. Taint accepted the hot dog Jakubin offered and let him walk right into his kennel. Jakubin didn’t have any issues with Taint that day or in the days that would follow. He would just walk up to the kennel, feed Taint a hot dog, and go on in. On the way out, the dog followed him willingly. And this was how Taint the problem dog became Jakubin’s dog.
When Jakubin’s assignment at Lackland came to an end, a Marine stepped up to take over handling Taint. Jakubin was very clear about how to work with the dog to keep his temperament in check, carefully outlining a long list of do’s and don’ts. The Marine assured him he could manage Taint. But one day, not long after Jakubin departed, the Marine handler tried to get too close and Taint mauled him so badly that Lackland’s behavioral veterinarians were ready to destroy the dog. When word got back to Jakubin that they were planning on putting Taint down, he pleaded with them not to do it. “I will take him,” he told them. “I will deal with him.”
His request was approved, and soon Taint was on a plane to Colorado, where Jakubin had taken a position at the United States Air Force Academy as kennel master. When he went to pick Taint up, Jakubin was nervous. It’d been months since he’d last seen his old partner, so he put on gloves before opening Taint’s crate, just in case the dog had changed his attitude. But Taint came out of his crate happy. Together, Jakubin and Taint would go on to prove the naysayers wrong, winning multiple competitions and meeting the regular requirements for detection work without difficulty.
By 2009, time caught up with Taint. The ten-year-old dog’s health had deteriorated: his bladder was shot and his cataracts were so bad he was nearly blind. But the tenacious Belgian Malinois continued running drills, his accuracy at detection spot-on perfect. Even as his body was riddled with illness and infirmity, he was outperforming dogs half his age with twice his strength. Those who knew and watched them together as a team—like Sergeant Timothy Bailey, Jakubin’s head trainer—believe the dog’s iron will to survive derived solely from his attachment to Jakubin.
One day Bailey was supposed to take Taint in for a routine veterinary visit, but when Jakubin saw them getting ready to leave, he decided he wanted to be the one to go. After they got there, it only took the vet a little while to determine that the dog was dying. Taint’s lungs were filling with fluid. It was unlikely, the vet told Jakubin, that he would survive the night. So Jakubin brought Taint back outside and they walked for nearly two miles before going back to the vet and saying good-bye.
When Jakubin returned to the kennels, he came back alone. He didn’t hide his grief. It was the first time any of his handlers saw Jakubin so emotionally bare; the first time they ever saw Jakubin cry.
When Bailey spoke to the sizeable crowd at Taint’s memorial service, he tried to impart to those gathered how rare Jakubin’s relationship with Taint really was. Their relationship spanned the dog’s life. “Jak and Taint could probably almost go in for records of being the longest team together,” he said. “Your average K-9 military dog team is together for maybe three to four years and that’s the max.”
Jakubin and Taint were together for ten.
The muzzle on this dog is already speckled with gray and white, even though he is barely five years old. This coloring is the reason why the other handlers at the United States Air Force Academy call Mack, a moderately sized Belgian Malinois, the “ghost-faced killer.”
It’s a cold December morning in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Mack is riding in the back of one of the kennel’s vehicles outfitted especially for their dogs. Kennel Master Chris Jakubin, or Jak, as most of his handlers call him, is driving. His six-foot-four frame fills the cab of the car so that he has to hunch over the steering wheel. Dog hair dusts his black fleece. Jakubin and Mack are on their way to meet the handlers stationed at Buckley, another Colorado Air Force base located nearby, for a day of intrabase kennel training.
Mack doesn’t sit quietly, nor does he use the hour of downtime in the moving car to rest; he is constantly twisting and shifting or frenetically scratching at the metal interior of the made-for-canine backseat. He barks randomly at the cars he sees flying by his window on the highway, the sound throaty, hoarse, and loud. A smoker’s bark, Jakubin calls it. He grins. He has a special shine for Mack, the dog he fondly calls the reincarnation of Taint.
> In the backseat, Mack seems more stir-crazy than like the vicious impressions conjured by stories of Taint. But Mack hasn’t been an easy dog to work with, so in a way, Mack is continuing Taint’s legacy because in Taint’s legacy there is inherently a challenge. And Jakubin loves a good challenge—especially when it comes to training dogs. He calls it “polishing the turds.”
Chris Jakubin, kennel master of the US Air Force Academy, works with MWD Oli at a training facility in Colorado Springs, Colorado in December 2011.
There’s been a long line of turds, or problem dogs, who have graced the kennels under Jakubin’s command. In fact, he’s actively sought out difficult dogs from other kennels; it’s become something of a tradition. The very first dog to officially join the US Air Force Academy kennels after they opened in 2002 was Agbhar, a German shepherd. Agbhar was an asshole. Jakubin says this sheepishly but without hesitation because it’s the truth. Agbhar did not like people. Agbhar was not friendly. Agbhar was a problem dog. “Agbhar was in a way a misfit dog. Taint was a misfit dog,” Jakubin says. “Like the home for misfit toys, we’re the home for misfit dogs.”
A kennel master is pretty much exactly what it sounds like—the officer responsible for maintaining the kennels and overseeing the handlers and dogs who work there. It’s a high-ranking position in the dog-handling field. It’s also a role that comes with a lot of managerial responsibilities—from ordering the dogs’ food to assigning handlers to base patrol duty. Much of the work can have little to do with hands-on training. So how much a kennel master works with the dogs is entirely up to the kennel master. Will he be a desk man or a dog man?
Jakubin is decidedly a dog man. He operates under the philosophy that there is no single, cookie-cutter way to train a dog. Each dog is unique, and it’s the handler’s job to study that dog and learn that dog’s behavior. As Jakubin sees it, dogs tell their handlers how they need to be trained, not the other way around. All the handlers have to do is listen. His technique—which he honed while working with dogs like Taint, Agbhar, and Mack—begins with simple observation: first, uncover each dog’s weak points until they’re fully explored and understood; next, work through those weak points; and finally, build the dog’s confidence until that dog is performing at his highest potential. It is a long investigative process but one that comes with great reward—a dog who can contribute, a dog who can save lives.
Jakubin has been training dogs for nearly 30 years, almost his whole adult life. Getting on with dogs comes naturally to him. It all goes back to his first dog bite. One day in winter when he was just a kid, the family dog, a springer spaniel called Silly, went missing. They found the dog a couple of days later at a neighbor’s house. When young Jakubin went to retrieve Silly, the neighbor’s boxer bit him hard, the dog’s incisors puncturing his leg. Rather than scaring him off dogs for good, the experience fortified his desire to work with them—he calls it his Peter Parker moment. That was a long time ago and now, in his mid-forties, Jakubin’s arms and legs are pocked and colored with dog-bite scars.
Jakubin retired from the Air Force in 2005, so he’s free to wear civilian clothes while he works. On his head is either a Cubs baseball hat or a black wool skullcap that reveals the poke of a smooth ponytail just above his shirt collar. The long hair is a personal grooming choice that he takes shit for, constantly. An avid hiker, much of his spare time is spent tackling trails and peaks, knocking out the list of 14ers that he scales with three longtime hiking buddies. He walks with a slow, sometimes uneven gait. It’s not hard to see how, on a military base with some 4,000 cadets, someone might mistake him for a wayward backpacker.
One afternoon, as we drive back into the Springs from a day of training, the mountains rise up ahead of us, cutting across the sky, impossibly large. He looks over at me, his face brightening as if he’s just spotted old friends. “See that?” he says, nodding to the range as if there was any way I could miss it. “When I first saw those mountains I knew I was home.”
The Academy kennels are set back away from the road on the widespread campus, nestled against the outline of more Colorado mountains. Two mesh wire sculptures contoured in the shape of dogs guard the front door, flanking the walkway. A worn, black leather couch takes up room in the hallway, the walls of which are lined with framed photographs of each dog who has called this kennel home. Underneath each photo are rectangular pieces of wood, plaques listing the dog’s individual achievements: Taint’s drug find in May 2003 (five grams of marijuana); Ginger’s 115 individual bomb searches in August 2003 alone; and Agbhar’s second-place finish in bomb detection at the Tucson K-9 trials in 2003. This wall of colorful photos and the kennel’s modest, fenced-in training yard out back, with its seesaw plank of wood and cement tunnel, are reminiscent of a nursery school playground.
Just to the left is the door leading to the kennels themselves, and before that a clean and organized kitchen area. On the counter is a hand-written reminder not to feed Benga because he has a vet appointment the following day. Plastic specimen containers are lined up above the kitchen cabinets; inside, ghostly white, cocoon-shaped orbs float in a yellowish liquid, some kind of preservative. They are dog testicles. An homage of sorts, however bizarre, to the kennel’s dogs.
At the other end of the hall, Jakubin’s office is comfortable but cluttered. His desk is a mess of papers; equipment and gear are lumped in piles on the floor. Shelves and file cabinets are crowded with awards etched with achievements Jakubin has never mentioned. Across the hall, in what appears to be a little-used conference room, an old-fashioned mantelpiece hangs on the wall. The antique polished wood looks out of place, a relic in a room outfitted with more modern amenities—a large-screen television and plastic office chairs. It is the only thing Jakubin took from the original kennel, and on it sits a row of decorative tin boxes. Their sweetly curled pastel ribbons belie their contents: the ashes of the dogs the kennel has lost to illness and old age.
Jakubin is always affable, quick to make jokes and easy with his self-deprecating humor. “If there were no dogs,” he likes to say, “I don’t know what I’d be doing. I’d be working in a video store.” Still, he somehow manages to remain at arm’s length even when he’s talking about his wife and their two sons or describing the day that Taint died. If you ask him how he won Taint over, he’ll just kind of shrug and tell you he did it with a pocketful of hot dogs.
One afternoon as we walk through the campus, Jakubin runs into one of his handlers who has Benga, a German shepherd, in tow. The dog had banged his head, which caused a hematoma, the third on this ear. Now his left ear drooped, maybe from the weight of the stitches but more likely, said the vet, a lasting result of the repeated injury. That ear would probably never stand up straight again.
When the pair walks in, Benga lights up, immediately excited to see Jakubin, who is standing about three feet away, just out of his reach. The dog wants to get to him—his ears are snapped as high and tall as they will go, his eyes are wide and seeking, a high-pitched whine catches in his throat as he tap-dances his paws up and down, desperate to be closer.
In 1914, at the beginning of WWI, there was one man, Lieutenant Colonel E. H. Richardson, who stood as the lone advocate for integrating canines into Her Majesty’s battalions, arguing that their potential to assist on the battlefield would be unparalleled. Other countries, he argued, were already using dogs to great advantage: the Germans employed dogs, as did the Russians. The Bulgarians and Albanians positioned them as sentry guards. France was trying to integrate dogs into its army. Italy and Sweden were also experimenting with canines as a military force. But Richardson’s petition fell on deaf ears.
Firm in his belief that dogs could be trained to great advantage for England’s cause, Richardson carried on his campaign until finally, in 1916, an officer from the Royal Artillery sent a request for trained dogs to “keep up communications between his outpost and the battery during heavy bombardment.”1
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Lieutenant Colonel E. H. Richardson, “the father of war dogs” (at least as we know them today), pulls bandages from the kit of a British Red Cross dog, circa 1914.
Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
In the years that followed, Richardson’s success with dogs was unsurpassed. He would write of his progress with his dogs in two highly regarded tomes: British War Dogs: Their Training and Psychology and Watch Dogs: Their Training and Management. When the US Marine Corps began its official program, the Dogs for Defense, in 1942, his techniques served as a guidebook of sorts, the holy bible of war dogs.
Through his writings the colonel revealed himself to be a man of incredible open-mindedness and gentility, especially when it came to the treatment of his dogs. He was kind to the animals, intolerant of cruelty, and expected dog handlers, or “keepers” as they were called, to act as he did. Of the “first importance,” he writes, is the character of the keeper:
This must be accompanied by a fondness for, and a gentleness with, dogs. Complete confidence and affection must exist between dogs and keeper, and a man whose only idea of control is by coercion and fear is quite useless. I have found that many men who are supposedly dog experts, are not sufficiently sympathetic, and are apt to regard the dog too much as a machine. . . .
The highest qualities—love and duty—have to be appealed to and cultivated. Coercion is of no avail, for of what use would this be when the dog is two or three miles away from its keeper? In fact, it may be said that the whole training is based on appeal. To this end the dog is gently taught to associate everything pleasant with its working hours.2
For a man whose experience with training dogs occurred in the first years of the twentieth century, Richardson was progressive. Compulsion and harsh corrections were once the presiding model of dog training in the military. (It seemed this was one of Richardson’s teachings that was not so faithfully adhered to in the US military’s early consultation of his manuals. This attitude would only start to change in the 1980s with a turn toward reward- and praise-based training, one where handlers would cull success from their dogs by relying on a positive reward system in conditioning.) Richardson was about one hundred years ahead of the curve in laying the framework for the modern-day handler. He preached patience, a respect for the animal, and appealed to the sensitivity in man as well as the dog. Dogs should not be “roughly handled or roughly spoken to.” In his opinion even a lack of sympathy was grounds for dismissal. Even a strong dog, he warned, could “be easily thrown back in his training, or even spoiled altogether, by sharp handling.”
War Dogs Page 4